Creation Story
Donna Troy did not begin as a character. She began as a continuity error, and every convoluted, contradictory version of her since has been an attempt to fix it. She has been an Amazon orphan, a magical duplicate of Wonder Woman, a girl raised by the gods, and, by one writer’s own account, a character with no coherent past at all. The knot starts at her very first appearance.
The confusion is older than she is. For years, “Wonder Girl” was not a sidekick at all; she was Wonder Woman as a teenager, appearing in flashback stories inside the Wonder Woman title that showed Princess Diana at earlier ages. There was no separate character, just young Diana. When an editor assembled the second Teen Titans adventure and needed a lineup of junior heroes, he pulled “Wonder Girl” onto the team alongside Robin and Kid Flash, apparently not realizing she was only Diana’s younger self. Suddenly there were two Wonder Girls in continuity: the flashback Diana, and a brand-new girl standing next to Robin who plainly could not be her.
Writer Bob Haney was left to make that second Wonder Girl a real person, and the character who filled the gap became Donna Troy. She had no name for four years and no origin for longer, which is fitting for someone who began as a continuity error rather than a pitch. When Marv Wolfman rebuilt the Teen Titans in 1980, he made her a cornerstone of the team, and he also, by his own account, found her history so broken that she effectively had no coherent origin to work from. He was not wrong. “Who is Donna Troy?” became a recurring story the comics kept telling, because the honest answer kept changing.
That is the strange thing to know about her first appearance: it is not really the debut of a design or an idea, but the moment a mistake became a person the DC Universe then had to keep.
First Appearance: The Brave and the Bold #60
The first appearance (1st app) of Donna Troy is The Brave and the Bold #60, cover-dated July 1965, by Bob Haney and Bruno Premiani. It is the Teen Titans’ second outing, and the first issue where Wonder Girl appears as a member of the team, a distinct young hero rather than a flashback version of Wonder Woman.
That distinction is the whole reason the issue is her key. She is not named, not explained, and not yet “Donna Troy,” but she is, for the first time, a separate person on the page, and every later version of the character traces back to this appearance. For a first-appearance archive, it is the debut that matters, even though the reader in 1965 had no idea a new character was being born by accident.
Wonder Woman #23 vs The Brave and the Bold #60
The dispute over Donna Troy’s first appearance comes down to which Wonder Girl you mean. The name is older than the character, and the two are not the same person.
| Wonder Woman #23 (1947) | The Brave and the Bold #60 (1965) | |
|---|---|---|
| Who “Wonder Girl” is | Princess Diana as a teenager, in flashback | A distinct young hero on the Teen Titans |
| A separate character? | No, she is young Wonder Woman | Yes, she cannot be Diana |
| Named “Donna Troy”? | No | Not yet, and not until 1969 |
| Collector significance | Not Donna Troy’s debut | Donna Troy’s first appearance |
The earlier Wonder Girl, from Wonder Woman #23 (1947) and the “Impossible Tales” that followed, is Princess Diana herself shown at a younger age, with no separate life or name. The Wonder Girl in The Brave and the Bold #60 (1965) is a member of the Teen Titans, which is only possible if she is someone other than Diana, since Wonder Woman is a grown adult elsewhere in continuity. That contradiction is what forced her into being a real, separate character. So the resolution is clean even if the history is not: Wonder Woman #23 is young Wonder Woman and not a debut for anyone new, and The Brave and the Bold #60 is the first appearance of the distinct character who becomes Donna Troy.
First Named Donna Troy: Teen Titans #22
She did not get the name until Teen Titans #22, cover-dated 1969, four years after she joined the team. That issue finally gave Wonder Girl a secret identity, Donna Troy, and a first origin: an orphan rescued from an apartment-building fire by Wonder Woman and raised on Paradise Island.
It is a secondary key, not the debut, and the gap between the two issues is the point. Most characters are named and explained in the same breath as their first appearance. Donna arrived as an unnamed accident in 1965 and only became “Donna Troy” in 1969, the first of many attempts to turn a continuity glitch into a coherent hero. Collectors chase The Brave and the Bold #60 for the first appearance and Teen Titans #22 for the first name and origin, and the four years between them is the cleanest possible summary of how unusual this character’s beginnings were.
